Robert Louis Stevenson
Scottish novelist who wrote Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde despite lifelong illness Show bio
Bio
Robert Louis Stevenson spent sick boyhood winters in bed while his nurse read to him. He dictated stories to his mother and nurse before he could even read.
Stevenson chose writing over the family trade of lighthouse engineering, telling his father at twenty. He recalled those sickbed days in A Child's Garden of Verses, poems he dedicated to his nurse. Stevenson reportedly modeled a cave in Treasure Island on one near a childhood summer home.
He settled in Samoa in 1890, and alarm at foreign influence there darkened his fiction. Stevenson died there of a stroke at 44, and his books remain among the world's most translated.